Golf's Major Championships

[fuagf]

Yep. Though one major difference is that the soccer teams are major players
in local, even country, cultures. Individual golfers aren't nearly as much.

How the Super League Fell Apart

Frantic phone calls, secret meetings and high-stakes threats: The inside story of how a billion-dollar European soccer superleague was born, and then collapsed, in less than a week.

By Tariq Panja and Rory Smith Published April 22, 2021Updated Oct. 22, 2021

Leer en español .. https://www.nytimes.com/es/2021/04/23/espanol/superliga-europea.html .

LONDON — For 48 hours, soccer stood on the brink. Fans took to the streets. Players broke into open revolt. Chaos stalked the game’s corridors of power, unleashing a shock wave that resonated around the world, from Manchester to Manila, Barcelona to Beijing, and Liverpool to Los Angeles.

That internationalism is what has turned European soccer, over the last 30 years, into a global obsession. The elite teams of western Europe are stocked with stars drawn from Africa, South America and all points in between. They draw fans not just from England, Italy and Spain, but China, India and Australia in numbers large enough to tempt broadcasters across the planet to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for the rights to show their games.

But while soccer is now the biggest business in sports, it remains, at heart, an intensely local affair. Teams rooted in neighborhoods and based in small towns compete in domestic leagues that have existed for more than a century, competitions in which the great and the good share the field — and at least some of the finances — with the minor and the makeweight.

An uneasy truce between the two faces of the world’s game had held for decades. And then, on Sunday night, it cracked, as an unlikely alliance of American hedge funds, Russian oligarchs, European industrial tycoons and Gulf royals sought to seize control of the revenues of the world’s most popular sport by creating a closed European superleague.

How that plan came together and then spectacularly collapsed is a story of egos and intrigue, avarice and ambition, secret meetings and private lunches, international finance and internecine strife. It lasted just two frantic, feverish days, but that was more than enough time to shake the world.

The Secret

Continued - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/sports/soccer/super-league-soccer.html